The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College Welcomes Four Writers for Its 2026 Summer Residency Program

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College, now in its fifth year, welcomed its cohort of four writers this summer, Chihiro Shibata, Fawziah A. Qadir, Stephanie Jenn Boggs, and Tomomi J. Emoto.

The Hurston Fellows are in residence for three weeks this summer. Each fellow spends their time working, writing, and researching independently on dedicated projects for the duration of the residency. Founded and directed by Associate Research Professor Donna Ford Grover, the Hurston Fellowship enables writers from all disciplines who have not had the opportunity to develop their scholarship, and supports writers who are currently employed as adjuncts or visiting professors with terminal degrees.

“The diverse academic backgrounds and voices of the participants of this program merge together into a wonderful writing community,” said Grover. “The Bard College campus is a fitting backdrop for the amazing work that happens in these three weeks.”

While in residence as a Hurston Fellow, Chihiro Shibata will work on a chapter from her dissertation on the effects of body size in wild golden-handed tamarin monkeys (Saguinus midas) in Suriname. Shibata will draw on field data from the main study group, which consists of locomotor and postural patterns, activity budgets, and sleeping site selection, to address a larger discussion on how the golden-handed tamarins adapt to being the “gorillas” among the tamarin species of the South American rain forests. Shibata is a lecturer in the anthropology department at Queens College, City University of New York.

Fawziah Qadir will spend her time during the Hurston Fellowship working on her project Refusal as Praxis: Black Mothers, Educational Malpractice, and the Politics of Opting Out, which examines Black mothers’ participation in the opt-out movement as a form of political resistance to educational malpractice in US public schools. Drawing on qualitative interviews and narrative analysis, the project reframes opting out not as parental disengagement, but as deliberate refusal—an act that exposes the limits of schooling systems built on compliance rather than care. Grounded in Critical Race Theory, Black feminist thought, interest convergence, and the capabilities approach, Qadir’s manuscript positions Black mothers as theorists whose lived experiences generate critical insights into the failures of contemporary educational reform. It also turns inward, interrogating how refusal operates as a methodological and pedagogical stance within the researcher’s own scholarly practice. Qadir is a lecturer in the Education Program at Barnard College.

As a Hurston Fellow, Stephanie Jenn Boggs will spend her time advancing her first book. Her cultural memoir seamlessly bridges her scholarly research and fieldwork in Black studies, media studies, and visual culture with ethnographical and familial accounts to explore US screen history. Boggs is the Mellon Visiting Faculty Scholar-in-Residence of Black Intellectual Thought at Xavier University of Louisiana.

Tomomi J. Emoto is currently completing a book-length ethnohistory of Tsushima Island, Japan, integrating archival research with her ethnographic fieldwork to illuminate the island’s complex borderland identities. Her scholarship is grounded in extensive, long-term ethnographic fieldwork, with theoretical focus upon historical consciousness, nationalism, cultural performance of identity, and border studies. Emoto is an adjunct assistant professor at Queens College, City University of New York.
 

This event was last updated on 06-26-2026

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